Elena Ferrante’s latest novel The Lying Lives of Adults is set to hit Netflix on January 4.
The six-part series, written by Ferrante herself and three others including director Edoardo De Angelis, was presented in Rome Tuesday by the makers and cast including Rain Man and Hot Shots! star Valeria Golino, who plays the protagonist’s gritty and fiercely independent working class aunt and role model Vittoria.
“To be ‘wrong’, disobedient, free and vulgar, it’s a a role to some extent very distant (from me) but which fired my curiosity just when I read the book,” said the Naples-born actress, 57.
“I prepared an awful lot, perhaps for the first time, starting with the language (which includes Neapolitan dialect), because I felt a sense of anxiety. But Edoardo De Angelis is the calmest director I’ve worked with, he never sets off any alarms”.
The novel is an intimate coming of age story featuring a young woman, Giovanna, played by debutant Giordana Marengo, who rebels against her shabby-genteel parents by visiting Vittoria in secret.
It is the first novel by the anonymous Naples author to be adapted since the global smash hit Neapolitan Quartet.
De Angelis, the director, who adapted the work with Ferrante and scriptwriters Laura Paolucci and Francesco Piccolo, said: “Ferrante’s words are very beautiful and opening them up to grasp what lies inside them has been interesting.
“Adapting a novel is not complicated, it’s like reading it. When I read I project certain images into my mind, and that’s why we sometimes have different ideas regarding what we see on the screen”.
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